New on New Hampshire

For a hot minute earlier this decade, the college town of Lawrence, Kansas, had two tastefully mounted upscale restaurants: the PrairieFire Bistro on Massachusetts and chef Jean Michel Chelain’s Gallic-American restaurant, Bleujacket, at 811 New Hampshire. I don’t know whether the venues were too fancy for a town populated by budget-conscious university students or the food and service were too formal, but by 2003, neither restaurant was still in business.

By then, the formerly elegant Bleujacket dining room — which I’d described as “an iridescent shell of curves, created with translucent gold curtains, and banquettes upholstered in a coppery raspberry fabric” back in 2001 — had undergone a seriously trashy transformation. Imagine Hillary Clinton strutting around in a sparkly bra and panties like Britney Spears, and you’ll get an inkling of the jarring change when KC Masterpiece heirs Rich and Charlie Davis turned the place into Captain Ribman’s Meat Market. The Davis kids wanted a frat-boy hangout, so they installed TV screens, video games and neon beer signs; hired sexy waitresses; and served pork ribs and deep-fried Twinkies.

That didn’t last long, either. It took another couple of years before a new tenant would take on the challenge of creating a not-too-fussy but classy concept for this 134-year-old limestone building.

That’s where Michael Levy comes in.

The last time I wrote about Levy (“Way Out West,” April 13, 2006), he was running the ambitious Westside Deli & Bistro in a strip mall on the far west edge of Lawrence. Levy’s casual café served breakfast, lunch and dinner in one big, spacious and noisy room. It was laid-back during the daylight shifts, but for the dinner hour Levy draped his tables with linens, set out twinkly candles and played light jazz on the sound system. And he layered his menu with sophisticated but modestly priced entrées such as gnocchi in truffle sauce and pork scalloppine.

Unfortunately, the Westside Deli & Bistro was just far enough away from the town’s culinary mecca — the Massachusetts corridor — that it wasn’t at the top of anyone’s restaurant list.

When 811 New Hampshire became available, Levy took a gamble, moving his business downtown and making some changes in his restaurant’s style. Levy’s new place is the New Hampshire St. Bistro. It’s a lot snazzier than the Westside Deli, but no one cares whether patrons are wearing overalls and Harley-Davidson T-shirts or an Issa frock. (I saw both on one visit.)

The dining room looks much as it did in its Bleujacket period, with new translucent golden curtains screening off the main dining area from the bar and pretty flowers on the uncloaked tables. The menu is an interesting mix of Midwestern home-style dishes (Southern fried chicken, meatloaf, chicken potpie) and old-fashioned continental cuisine: steak au poivre, wiener schnitzel, roasted vegetable Wellington and coquille St. Jacques.

On the evening I went to Levy’s bistro with friends Craig and Wayne, we were walking across New Hampshire Street when we ran into a mutual friend who lives in Lawrence. “I used to eat at the New Hampshire Bistro a lot,” he told us, wrinkling his nose. “But I got tired of it. The fried chicken is really good, though.”

Since I’ve never agreed with this friend on matters of taste, I decided his opinion was a good omen for the New Hampshire St. Bistro. Levy’s menu, created with executive chef Randall Dickson, was the second positive sign for me. It’s eclectic, yes, but with a seductive array of small and large plates that really caught my fancy, including potato latkes (a holdover from Levy’s deli operation), escargot, and macaroni and cheese!

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Our trio shared a mound of crispy, tender calamari as a starter, along with a really terrific puck-sized crab cake made with lots of lump shellfish, just barely held together with a smidgen of breading and sided with a spoonful of tart caper-shallot salad.

Levy’s dinner entrées include soup or one of four salads, two of which are excellent: the blue salad made with romaine, roasted red peppers and a house-made blue-cheese dressing; and the spinach salad with bacon and a shard of pecan-crusted goat cheese splashed with a Dijon vinaigrette. The Caesar did include a couple of anchovies, but its dressing was unrecognizable.

Wayne ordered that night’s fish special, described in breathtaking detail by our server as some Creole blackened-catfish creation; what actually appeared was a hunk of catfish swimming in creamed corn and drowned in a thick and peppery-hot cream sauce. “I like the fish,” Wayne said, “when I can find it.”

Craig’s plump, sweet grilled scallops were wrapped in a sliver of oven-crisped prosciutto and laid atop a pile of fluffy polenta; it wasn’t the classic preparation of coquille St. Jacques (scallops browned in a creamy wine sauce) but tasty enough. I had the almost perfect dish of the night: a bowl of rich fettuccine Alfredo tossed with big, succulent pieces of lobster (and excessively bitter broccoli rabe).

At his previous restaurant, Levy imported most of his desserts from a Kansas baker, but the sweets are made in-house. Homemade Grand Marnier ice cream jazzed up with bits of fresh orange zest made a memorable finale to a nice meal.

I returned the following week with Wendy, Eddie and Bob, who were charmed by Levy’s new lair. We slid into a roomy booth with a big table that we quickly filled with lots of things to share: silken hummus loaded with garlic and served with toasted slices of good French baguette; plump, steamed mussels in a white-wine-garlic sauce loaded with spicy chorizo (the mussels were great but needed a bigger bowl — the chorizo had settled to the bottom of the cute, boxy dish); a first-rate potato latke served with sour cream and applesauce; and a small dish of fabulous macaroni and cheese — penne in a cheesy sauce rich with butter and white wine.

Bob and Wendy liked the spinach salad and the Kansas salad (baby greens in a sunflower vinaigrette) but argued that they’d been dressed a little too discreetly. I opted for a crock of the extraordinary onion soup — a supple caramelized-onion stew in a hearty veal broth under a bubbly blanket of cheese.

Who needed dinner after all that? But Eddie adored his superb 12-ounce Kansas City strip, grilled au poivre-style with an evanescent pepper crust and dripping with a cognac pan sauce. Wendy dined luxuriously on one of this bistro’s best-selling dishes, the 12-ounce rib eye frite, served with a heap of real Paris-style frites.

Alas, Bob was underwhelmed by the fried chicken (it was disappointingly greasy), and I wished I had ordered something more exotic than the wiener schnitzel — a dish that always sounds so good but invariably arrives as a deep-fried breaded cutlet that even the piquant lemon-caper sauce here couldn’t help.

Soon, though, the head-spinningly rich chocolate mousse and a gorgeous crème brûlée improved my mood dramatically.

Levy calls his restaurant “a fancy little bistro without all the pomp and circumstance.” But there’s plenty of pomp in the food here. And when it comes to the check at the end of the night, the circumstances are just right for a college town.